


and you know damn well, for you, i would ruin myself a million little times.

by LLReid



Series: the ghosts of girlfriends past. [1]
Category: Bloodbound (Visual Novels), Queen B (Visual Novel)
Genre: Anastasia’s Backstory, Canon LGBTQ Character, College, F/F, Fluff and Mush, LGBTQ Character, LGBTQ Female Character, Learning a New Language, Light Angst, Romance, Teacher-Student Relationship, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-21
Updated: 2020-10-21
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:02:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27128284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LLReid/pseuds/LLReid
Summary: Inspired by; Illicit Affairs by Taylor Swift.~~~~~“Do you ever want to punch a student in the face for taking up valuable moments of your life that you’ll never get back? Cause that’s where I’m at now.” The redhead sighed and rolled her eyes at the essay in her hand, and Ina made a mental note of the fact that ridiculously adorable Kazakh accent came out more when she was irritated. “Ina, I’m not even kidding... Bea Hughes has obviously typed random words at the end and changed the colour to white to raise her word count. The whole thing is terrible.”“Oh, kind of like you did last week—““That was different.”“How was that different?,” she chuckled, her eyes blazing over the rim of her reading glasses at her.“The Benadryl you suggested I take for my allergies got me high and I don’t even remember writing that essay. You should just be thankful I turned something in,” giggled Anastasia. “The whole of last week doesn’t exist to me.”
Relationships: Ina Kingsley/Anastasia Swann, Ina Kingsley/Original Character
Series: the ghosts of girlfriends past. [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1974595
Comments: 4
Kudos: 34





	and you know damn well, for you, i would ruin myself a million little times.

“What the fuck?” A sigh. “Seriously? What in the everloving fuck is this shit?”

Ina snorted and looked up from the pile of exams she was grading at her desk to be confronted with the sight of Anastasia glaring at one of the essays she’d been asked to grade. All evening she’d been trying her best not to laugh too much at the muttered curses and snarky comments made in multiple languages that had been coming from her TA, but the girl was just far too endearing for her own good and she couldn’t hold it in any longer.

“Something wrong, Nastyona?,” she laughed.

“Do you ever want to punch a student in the face for taking up valuable moments of your life that you’ll never get back? Cause that’s where I’m at now.” The redhead sighed and rolled her eyes at the essay in her hand, and Ina made a mental note of the fact that ridiculously adorable Kazakh accent came out more when she was irritated. “Ina, I’m not even kidding... Bea Hughes has obviously typed random words at the end and changed the colour to white to raise her word count. The whole thing is terrible.”

“Oh, kind of like you did last week—“

“That was different.”

“How was that different?,” she chuckled, her eyes blazing over the rim of her reading glasses at her. 

“The Benadryl you suggested I take for my allergies got me high and I don’t even remember writing that essay. You should just be thankful I turned something in,” giggled Anastasia. “The whole of last week doesn’t exist to me.”

She snorted. “Your text messages were extremely entertaining.”

Anastasia pouted — and that was all it took. Ina couldn’t stay sat at her desk when the woman she was dating was so adorable without even trying to be. So she got up and moved across the room to where she was sat on the floor by the coffee table in front of the fireplace and sat herself down beside her.

“That stuff may be marketed for kids but anyone who drugs their children with the so-called-child-strength-Benadryl is insane. It was the best high of my life— I— Shit— Um, not that I know what being high feels like—“

“Mhm,” she huffed, tucking a long strand of ginger hair behind her ear for her. “You’re the model of perfect behaviour, Miss Swann.”

“I am the epitome of innocence, professor. My best friends Lily and Zoey will vouch for me,” Anastasia said so seriously that Ina started laughing. She batted her eyelids, drawing Ina’s attention to her glacial blue eyes. Even now, after knowing her for months, the shade of blue still continued to shock her every time she saw her eyes. How nature could even grant someone such pretty eyes, she hadn’t the faintest clue, all she knew was that she could drown in that gaze, if given half the chance. “I’m being real with you here. I’ve never done anything wrong, ever.”

“You’re very well behaved when you want to be... or if you’re given the proper incentive.”

“Is that your way of calling me a brat?”

She smirked, twirling the strand of hair that she’d only just tucked behind her ear after it fell free again. She gave it a teasing tug and Anastasia’s breath hitched. “I wouldn’t dream of it. You’re an angel.”

Anastasia fluttered her eyelashes again, knowing how the colour of her eyes made Ina weak at the knees. “I don't know if anyone's ever told you this,” Anastasia began, caressing her face. Ina didn’t blush, and her eyes didn’t dart away. Instead Anastasia found herself staring into pots of tarnished gold — one smooth and perfect, the other blemished by a tiny ripple of green and grey. "You're very attractive."

She’d been complimented on her appearance before. But never in her tone of voice. Of all the things this girl had said, she didn’t know why this caught her off guard. But it startled her so much that without thinking she blurted out, "I could say the same about you." She paused. "In case you didn't know."

A slow grin spread across her face. "Oh, trust me. I know.”

A small smile tugged at the corners of her lips as she leaned in and pressed her mouth against hers. Anastasia was just so... different from anyone else she’d ever known. She was so worldly and intelligent, yet so down to Earth. She was one of the few people at Belvoire who had so far remained completely unaffected by the drama, who’d become genuinely liked by the staff and students alike — Ina heard her name mentioned at least once a day in the teachers lounge by colleagues who also seemed to know that Anastasia was the rare sort of student that came along only once every couple of years. It seemed she was excelling in every class she was taking and it seemed clear to everyone she was destined to go on to do great things, yet Ina couldn’t help but feel more than a little smug when she heard her colleagues raving about her girl. They might’ve been oblivious to the nature of their relationship but that didn’t mean she didn’t smile from ear to ear when she heard someone singing her praises. 

She knew that many people would’ve condemned them both for being together — and she knew the reasons that they would do so were very valid. Hell, if someone had asked her only a year earlier, she’d have condemned a relationship like theirs. The uneven power dynamics between a professor and her student weren’t lost on her and she had tried to stay away from Anastasia, really, she had tried... but she just couldn’t do it. She died a thousand times each day when she had to deny her in public, and often found herself wondering how many times each day Anastasia died the very same way.

So they soaked up as much private time as they could, because neither of them could be without the other. Walking the length of the city together. Seeing plays on Broadway at the weekends. Coffee dates. Many nights of ‘private tutoring’. Walks through the city’s many landscaped parks.. which always made Ina wonder if many gardens were beautiful because they were imperfect? Weren’t the strange, new flowers that arose by mistake or misadventure as pleasing as the well-tended and planned?

With Anastasia, Ina always found herself feeling better, feeling more like herself than she did at any other time. It was as if — despite a thirteen year age gap — she could completely sympathise with her thoughts and help her channel them away, and she could always take comfort in her lovely face.

“Would I be in trouble if I wrote a snarky comment on Bea’s essay?”

“That depends entirely on what you want to write,” she smirked against her lips.

“Well I do this weird thing when I’m grading essays where I literally count every word I read—“

“You count every word you read?,” she laughed. “Why on earth would you do that?”

“My high school English teacher wanted all of our essays handwritten, so I’d have to manually count each word to include in the end total— anyway, I was just going to score out her word count and write the correct number... then maybe write the references to the passages she copied and pasted. I used the same ones to study from.”

“Include a ‘see me after class’ in there whilst you’re at it,” she nodded. “That girl is a real piece of work. She’s taken to Belvoire like a duck to water.”

“She’s very greedy... and problem with greedy people, someone once said to me, is that they think everyone else is as greedy as they are. She hasn’t realised yet that the surest way to slow your own progress and personal development is to rush yourself into situation you're not ready for... and she doesn’t understand the games she’s playing yet. She’ll be the one who gets hurt in the end,” Anastasia nodded. “She started out so nice but every choice she’s made— What happens if you make so many misguided choices?”

“You must try to correct it.”

“But what if it’s too late? What if you can’t?”

“Then you must find a way to live with it.” There was a sad sympathy in Ina’s catlike eyes as she regarded Anastasia again, the sweet girl who felt everything so deeply. She gently brushed her bottom lip with her thumb. “I’ve been teaching here a long time and I’ve seen girls like Bea come and go... some come back from the brink but most don’t. There's a lot about discovering who you are and how difficult that is — and it never stops... but there is nothing more terrifying than the absoluteness of one who believes they’re right, even when everyone else can see they’re becoming a monster.”

Anastasia sighed and nodded her head, before turning to dig in her backpack. “I have the websites she used noted in here...”

Ina watched as she pulled out a notebook, one she’d never seen her use before with ‘LILY’S BITCH’ printed in neon block letters and a picture of Borat on the cover... some odd inside joke between friends that she’d never understand, obviously. In class she normally just typed her notes, so it was quite surprising to see an entire notebook filled with her distinctive handwriting, diagrams, and brightly coloured sketch notes that looked like they belonged on a Pinterest board. Her inner nerd was immediately so intrigued by all the different fonts and colours and drawings that it took her an embarrassingly long moment to realise not one thing was written in English.

She knew English wasn’t Anastasia’s first language but she’d never stopped to consider that she might be more comfortable with any other language because she was so fluent in it, only making the odd mistake and sometimes structuring her sentences in a way that sounded awfully formal to the native speaker. People always thought they knew other people, but they didn’t, Ina realised. Not really. Maybe they knew things about them, like how they wouldn’t eat doughnuts or they liked horror movies or whatever else. But they didn’t know what their friends or their lovers did in their bedrooms alone at night or what had happened to them when they were kids or if they felt fucked up or sad for no reason at all. And she’d had no clue that Anastasia took the time to make something so beautiful... which made her wonder if she ever actually slept.

“What language is this written in?,” she asked, brushing her fingertips across a beautifully decorated page.

“Well I take my notes on my laptop in English when we’re in class, but I translate them all into either Russian or Kazakh... which one depending on my mood when I’m studying,” she explained. “I’m a visual learner but for some reason I still struggle to absorb information written in English, even though I went to high school in England and can read English better than I speak it most days. My English spelling is still so bad sometimes, though. It’s really weird—“

“I don’t think that’s weird. English is your third language,” she interjected, quietly marvelling at the intimidating alphabet surrounded by sparkly doodles. Strange, she’d taught her all of the information in this book, yet she couldn’t understand what she was looking at. “What’s this page about?”

“The lecture you gave on sexuality,” Anastasia explained. “It’s written in Russian.”

“The letters are beautiful— I mean, if letters can even be beautiful.”

Anastasia smiled. “I know what you mean. In Kazakhstan — in the cities at least — we mostly speak in Russian and our school lessons were still delivered in Russian when I was young. So I actually learned how to write in the Russian language before Kazakh, but they’re very similar so it was easy becoming fluent in both... but I’ve never learned our other languages.”

“I never knew that. How many languages are spoken there?”

“A lot,” Anastasia beamed, her eyes shining with nostalgia. “They call us the gateway between Europe and Asia for a reason. Especially my hometown, Almaty, there are so many cultures all mixed together... and we’re the cultural capital so it’s— I’m rambling, aren’t I?”

“I like hearing you talk about your home,” she confessed as she propped her chin on her hand, “and not only because it’s a country I know next to nothing about. It’s important to you... so it’s important to me, too.”

Anastasia’s cheeks flushed a sweet rosy shade of pink. “You really are getting far too good at flustering me.”

“It’s what I live for.” She chuckled breathily and leaned in to kiss her cheek. “Teach me to write something in Russian.”

The younger woman’s eyebrows shot up. “Really?”

“My interest has been piqued,” she nodded, brushing her finger against the notebook page again. “Go easy on me, though. I’m told I’m a piece of work when my ego is bruised.”

She didn’t miss the small smile that spread across Anastasia’s face as she turned to the very back of the book. The last page was filled with doodles and swatches of different coloured gel pens, highlighters, and markers, and Ina watched with rapt fascination as her left hand glided across the bottom of the page. The letters Ина Кингсли appeared in the red ink she’d been using to grade the essays, her handwriting as neat as ever.

“That’s your name,” Anastasia smiled.

“Why is there a backwards N at the end of my surname as well as the beginning of my first?,” she marvelled.

“It can be an ‘i’ or a ‘y’ equivalent,” she explained whist writing out something else. Анастасия. “This is my name. The backwards R at the end is a representation of the ‘ya’ sound, which is why it’s different from the other a’s. There are a few Cyrillic letters that represent sounds when translated to English, as opposed to just one letter.”

“So the ‘ya’ is its own letter entirely, and the English letters ‘i’ and ‘y’ translate to the same letter,” she nodded. “Okay... got it.”

Anastasia smiled as she wrote out the entire Cyrillic alphabet alongside their English counterparts, explaining each letter and certain grammatical rules in great detail as she went. She had her copy out the alphabet and practice her own name a few times, before then going on to show her how to join up her letters. Ina sat there and listened and was enthralled anew, for good lessons, it seemed, never lost their magic.

“Your first name would actually be pronounced more like Ee-na to the native speaker,” Anastasia explained, watching as Ina wrote her name and Lilian’s. “The same way the ‘i’ in my name is pronounced more like ‘Ee’.”

“Ah, so that’s why you get so irritated with the American pronunciation,” she laughed.

“I still don’t understand how you can see ‘Anastasia’ and get ‘Anna-stay-shuh’. It’s butchering a classic name and I just won’t stand for it,” giggled Anastasia. “It’s the ‘shuh’ part at the end that really just sounds like nails on a chalkboard to me.”

Ina snorted and shook her head. “God... you’re adorable.”

Some women’s idea of a good date night may have been an expensive dinner date, but something this simple and intellectually stimulating was what Ina lived for. It might’ve been unbearably nerdy of her to be so turned on by this, but she was a firm believer that the sexiest part of a woman was her mind... and Anastasia’s mind was a wealth of knowledge she was eager to uncover.

When she was young people had said that she laughed too often and fell in love too quickly and drank too freely, and whilst she’d certainly had her fun, she wasn’t sure that was true. She couldn’t actually remember the last time she’d felt this content with her life. How she’d love to get away from Belvoire with her and be someone else for a while in a place where no one knew or expected certain things from them, where their relationship didn’t have the potential to ruin them both.

But even with the constant threat of discovery looming over their heads, all Ina felt was peace. The sort of peace that not even her favourite fantasy novels or a strong drink could give her. As she sat there on her office floor with the woman she was well aware she had already fallen in love with nestled halfway on her lap, learning a new language she’d previously had no plans to learn, and laughing innocently like a child, she was reminded that greatness lay even in the smallest of moments.

She’d always been a logical person, knowing that logic would save you when nothing else would. So she knew this could only end one way. She knew it. Down to her bones, she knew it. How she hoped she was wrong, though. What she hadn’t yet realised was that you can never know about about your own destiny: are the people you meet there to play a part in your destiny, or have you crossed their path just to play an important role in theirs?

~ fin.


End file.
